


place my bones in order

by lisewrites



Category: Supergirl (TV 2015)
Genre: F/F, actual genuine love, it's not smut if it's Making Love, soft
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-11-08
Updated: 2018-11-08
Packaged: 2019-08-20 20:12:55
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,991
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16562381
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lisewrites/pseuds/lisewrites
Summary: Lena Luthor has spent twenty three years being glanced over. Until she meets a girl who can see through her bones.





	place my bones in order

**Author's Note:**

> I thought about this for all of 30 seconds, so I had to write a few thousand words about it :) 2 more parts r coming. Hope you enjoy.

i

Lena is, for all intents and purposes, visible.  
She understands that her body is opaque. Light may reflect from her skin and back through the flexing hole of an onlooker’s pupil. Her image may be burnt onto a retina.  
She understands that her body is water and bone and and muscle and soft organs and sweat and hair and cum and blood, and if she were to cut herself she would certainly bleed.  
And so; Lena is, for all intents and purposes, visible.  
And she understands that she is seen. She leads press conferences, gives speeches, hosts galas. She is a public figure, and a visible one at that. Sometimes photographers even follow her long Mercedes Benz, lights popping on the opposite side of darkened windows. Lena has a name, and a building with that name on it. Lena Luthor has spent the past twenty three years being seen.  
Sometimes violently, intrusively, seen.  
Publicly, she is visible.  
But privately?  
Privately, Lena worries that she is nothing at all.  
It’s not precisely that she doesn’t know who she is, it’s more that she worries that she might be nobody.  
(Nobody has ever really looked at her anyway.)  
She had once, late one evening when she had first taken LutherCorp over from Lex, taken an X-ray of her own chest. And when she had hung it against the lightbox at the back of the lab, she had traced her fingertips over the thin white lines of her own ribs, curving over the plastic, and she had cried.  
There. There she was. Almost unimaginably tiny wavelengths of light had collided against her ribcage to create this image. Almost unimaginably, because she, Lena Luthor, is a genius who has no problem visualising measurements to the one trillionth of a metre. And she is undoubtably real.

And after her first meeting with Kara Danvers, she touches herself.  
She had had a long day. A long day which had been preceded by nearly a hundred other long days, since she stepped up to the helm of her brother’s company. A day which had left her feeling a little raw around the edges of her eyes, and restless in the centre of her continent-sized bed.  
Restless and drunk. Slurred restlessness. Black-out awareness.  
She worries, sometimes (every night, because half a bottle of whiskey isn’t quite enough to send her straight to sleep anymore) that nobody has seen the Real Her because there is no Real Her there to see.  
She worries that she is only mirrors and edges filed down to a sharp point. Sharpened by years and years of reflecting what people want to see from her. Sharp words and sharper looks. She worries that she is not real, on the inside. Just mirrors scrubbed raw, raw with her desperation to please.  
She knows that she has not lost herself.  
There was never a Her to be lost.  
She rolls over. Crushing her cheek against the pillow, breathing in the scent of absolutely nothing at all. She feels the whiskey in her stomach roll too, curling up towards her lungs. It coats her insides with something hot. And she forgets how to breathe deeply once more.  
Drowning in her bed, coated in whiskey, is a hot way for her to cry.  
She cries just as she has always done. Silently, burning from the inside out.  
So she strips down to nothing, needing to feel her cheap sheets crushing against her skin. She likes her sheets rough, so she can feel them. It is precisely the opposite of her childhood bed in the Luthor Mansion, where the sheets were so expensive she sometimes felt as though she might slide right off them, as though they were oil-slicked.  
As though her skin were oil-slicked.  
She does’t know if she likes it rough in bed, but she knows how she likes her sheets.  
(Her virginity doesn’t burn her the way it used to. The whiskey, at least, helps to douse that fire.)  
Her eyes are closed, but still a tear tracks its way down the side of her cheek, towards the dip of her ear.  
Anything else, think of anything else.  
Anything but the slippery sheets of her childhood.  
Thread counts shouldn’t be triggering.  
Instead she makes a conscious effort to think of the man who had shouted at her in the street that morning, the way his lips had curled up in a snarl as his spittle has flew towards her.  
(The tear had reached her ear. Retreating back inside her once more. She is truly underwater.)  
Or the reporter’s tight forearms, tanned skin spattered with almost transparently fair hairs, and muscle rippling over the sharp line of her bone. Tight.  
The girl wearing the glasses had been pretty.  
(Lena has seen a pretty girl before. She knows what pretty looks like.)  
Her name comes a little bit too easily to Lena’s alcohol drenched brain. But Kara Danvers, the young reporter had been…pretty.  
The kind of pretty which now, under the tightening darkness of her bedroom and her encroaching drunkenness, makes Lena’s heart race in a way which is almost completely foreign to her.  
It’s the kind of pretty which makes it easy for her to imagine Kara Danvers pressing towards her in the same violent way the man in the street had done. But Kara would not stop to scream, she would press on and on and on and on and on, until her pastel cardigan is tickling right against Lena’s bones. 90% collagen pressed against 100% cashmere.  
God.  
There’s something tight, something hot, curling somewhere deep behind her stomach.  
She knows what it is, to be turned on.  
Her virginity was once something she constantly thought about. She believed that others could see her inexperience drawn across her skin. Or maybe there was something virginal in the curve of her hips. She had felt a hot burn of pressure, when she was younger. Virgin, virgin, virgin, virgin virgin. It’s a pretty word. Now though, that burn has dulled to a quiet self-consciousness. Not because she’s never been fucked, she doesn’t care about that. She’s seen porn. She’s seen women bent over and begging and gasping and screaming and making loud, painful, noises of pleasure.  
(She doesn’t look at the men’s bodies. And she doesn’t like it when they make noises. And that’s something she has half-unpacked. Not ready to pull what that means all the way out of the box quite yet.)  
And so she doesn’t mind that she’s never been fucked. She knows how to touch at her clit until she gasps and cums, and relaxes back against her bed. This ache of self-consciousness clings onto the simple fact that nobody has seen her naked.  
Once, somebody had seen her naked, she is sure. When she was a young child. Once, surely somebody had bathed her. Once, somebody else had poured hot water over her head of dark curls and spoken to her in a language she now cannot name.  
(The lilting curves of her mother tongue sometimes come back to her in the last few moments of consciousness. When she is exhausted, but not drunk. No words, there are never any words. Just soft intonation. A hum.)  
But ever since she can remember, her entire life has been comprised of looks and stares and words and words and words and words.  
And nobody touched her.  
And nobody looks at her.  
Lena feels as though she is going out of her mind.  
Out of her skin.  
She imagines Kara Danvers above her, on top of her. Inside her. Kara Danvers inside her. Kara Danvers kissing against the edge of her mouth. Stripped of her pale blue shirt, the reporter would be left in nothing but skin and skin. Warm. Lena is sure that Kara Danvers would feel warm and solid and human in a deliberate sort of way. Lena tipped her head back, tear tracks drying against her cheek as she imagined feeling the reporter’s pulse against her wet lips.  
She spreads her legs.  
(She cries as she makes herself cum.)  
And she sleeps, eventually. Once everything in her head is a little quieter and the tears drip down against the back of her throat rather than over her cheeks. 

 

And the next morning, when she wakes to a pounding headache and a familiar dryness now spreading up the back of her throat, she simply rolls to the other side of her continent-sized bed. Shifting to where the pillows are cooler.  
She blinks up at the ceiling.  
And carefully constructs a new version of herself to show to the world that day.  
The shift shouldn’t feel seismic, yet it does. As though touching herself thinking of a practical stranger has left her shifting sense of self somehow altered.  
Her memory of Kara Danver’s face is already shifting from focus inside her mind. As though she had fucked the memory out of her own brain. And by the time she reaches her private elevator, catapulting up into the sky, she can no longer remember if the reporter’s eyes were blue or green.  
Each wall of Lena’s private elevator is entirely mirrored.  
She has never once made eye contact with herself in any of them.  
Chin up, eyes down Lena. Don’t make a scene.  
(She feels like screaming.)

 

***

 

The second time she meets Kara Danvers, she remembers.  
Kara’s eyes are blue. Almost too blue.  
Of course. Almost too blue is not a colour. It’s more of a feeling Lena gets when she looks at her. Too Blue.  
A kind of blue that makes it hard for Lena to breathe steadily.  
It’s almost a week later, in her office once again. Her secretary, who has been working with her for over eight months but whose name Lena is still struggling to remember, pokes her head through a crack in her office door.  
It’s late, after hours, and she is curled into and into and into herself on her slick leather sofa. Already halfway through her third glass of whiskey. She is deconstructing her fictional self for that day. Putting that character to bed as she resolutely does not allow her body to relax against the leather.  
(She hates leather, hates the way it sticks against her bare thighs. But her brother bought it, and she doesn’t have much of him left now. So it stays.)  
And maybe it’s the whiskey that makes it easier for her to agree instantly for Miss Danvers to be shown in. Too easy.  
And she sweeps into Lena’s space as though she had been raised there. In a loose fitting black t-shirt tucked into slim, grey, straight-legged trousers, buttoned tight against her waistline. Sensible heels. Chin up, shoulders back, a flyaway blonde curl bouncing over the revealed inch of her collarbones, where the t-shirt had slipped away from her skin.  
Fuck, her collarbones-  
Lena jerks to stand, heels skidding a little against the polished tiles. She feels their height difference immediately. It presses against the whiskey in her belly.  
God.  
She does not wobble.  
“Miss Danvers,” Good, her voice sounds good. Confident. Cool. “to what do I owe the pleasure.”  
No. Fuck. Her throat trembles over the word pleasure. Snapping it into almost three syllables, not two. She can feel every drop of blood in her body rush to sweat against her outstretched palm. Sweat sweat sweat sweat sweat.  
“Miss Luthor, it’s good to see you.”  
Kara Danvers steps closer to take Lena’s hand. She wonders if Kara can tell from the crack in her voice that she had fucked herself while thinking of her. Another sick, burning twist in her gut makes her almost wish Kara knew. Wishes that she could see though her veins and watch how her blood races as Kara touches her hand. Fuck-  
“I just wanted to hear what you thought of the article?” Kara’s words are rushed, running against one another, and she seems to take Lena not immediately cutting her off as a sign to keep going, indefinitely. “I don’t know if you’ve even read it. But, well, it was the first thing I’ve ever written. Well, like, not really, of course. I mean, I went to school, I’ve written essays, but I’ve never written professionally before and you were the one who told me I should and now I have and it was about you, well your company, and I wanted to hear for you what you thought. Or maybe you could just email me your feedback?”  
Lena smiles, and Kara stops talking.  
“Yes, I read it. I thought it was exceptional, and I found your belief in the new direction of LCorp…refreshing, to say the least. Please, take a seat.”  
Lena is relieved that her voice has recovered in the face of Kara’s rambling, but in a moment of madness, she indicates to the sofa. And then is left with no choice but to sit beside Kara Danvers, acres of white leather stretching between them.  
“It was the least I could do, and it was genuine, I genuinely believe you’re going to do great things with this company Miss Luthor.” She sits, crossing her legs politely and speaking with a flavour of earnestness Lena is immediately uncomfortable with.  
“Lena, please.” She reaches blindly towards the coffee table for her tumbler of whiskey, tipping the liquid up against her lips but not actually tasting it, not actually drinking.  
“If you’re Lena then I’m Kara.” The reporter smiles, sunny and whole. Lena feels almost too seen, as Kara blinks across at her with her too blue eyes.  
“Kara” she repeats, almost unconsciously. Tasting the word. Trying it out for the first time on her tongue.  
“Yes. Thank you so much for taking the time to speak to me again, I was worried I’d be too late to catch you here.”  
“I’m always here.”  
She doesn’t allow herself to stop and think about how sad her words sound. Borderline tragic. Instead she bites down hard on her own tongue and steels herself to put on a good show for Kara Danvers. She builds a new version of herself quickly, she’s well practiced at this. She knows it’s important to keep the press on her side.  
“Oh. Okay, good. Listen, I’ve been thinking a lot about LCorp while I was writing the article, and I’ve done almost too much research about the changes you’re making here. You’re making a new start, and the public should know about it.” Kara starts to fiddle with a loose thread on her trousers, pulling at it between her fingernails.  
“Are you asking to join my PR team?” Kara’s eyes shoot up as she starts to talk, and she lets out a breathy, nervous little laugh.  
“No, god no. I want to write a longform article, real investigative reporting. About what’s happening here.”  
“You already know, you’ve already interviewed me.”  
“No. I mean everything. Full context, full disclosure. The history of LuthorCorp. All the bad things, and all the good. Why the bad things happened. And about you. Your history, what you’re trying to create here. And why.” There’s something intense in Kara’s face as she looks across at her. Lena uncrosses and crosses her legs.  
“I’m…I’m Lex Luthor’s sister.”  
“And I want you to tell me what that’s like.”  
Lena has no idea what it’s like, and so she tips her head back and drains her glass. As she places it back against the table her hand shakes. Just a little. Kara doesn’t seem to notice.  
“What do I get from this?”  
“A clean slate. A real chance to start over. No more cloak and dagger operations and skeletons in closets, because everything will be out in the open. A proper, honest new start.”  
And because Lena has spent the past twenty three years being a good girl and giving people what they want from her, and because the sincerity is straining through and through Kara’s voice, she nods slowly. Not looking up at Kara.  
“I’ll need some time to think about it.”  
“So can we…can we speak again?”  
“Yes, yes we can speak again. I’m not against the press”  
“But the press are sometimes against you.” Lena looks up at her as she speaks, and the serious set of her jaw, the intensity of her stare leaves Lena’s chest clenching. She wishes there were more whiskey left in her glass.  
“Not really, not without good reason. My family-”  
“You’re not your family. And I believe you’re trying to create something better here. Listen, Lena, if you don’t want me to-”  
Suddenly, Kara’s phone is buzzing frantically in her pocket. One hand flies to it, the other clenches, white knuckled, into a fist.  
“I’m so sorry, I have to run. News never sleeps and all that, you know. Thank you for taking the time to speak with me, I hope we can do this again.”  
“Yes, of course-”  
“Here, my number.” Kara is rifling through her bag, then bending in on herself, scribbling on the back of a take-out receipt. Because of course she doesn’t have a business card. Of course. She presses it against Lena’s open palm, stands, and then smiles down at Lena. The kind of smile which might possibly be able to break her apart. “I won’t take up any more of your time, and thank you again for considering my ideas.”  
Lena blinks once, processing the feeling of Kara’s fingertips pressing against her hand. And then Kara is gone.  
Slipping from her office before Lena can even realise she’s leaving. 

 

(And Lena will consider it. When she touches herself, later, she will be thinking of this moment. She will imagine that there is a hot moment of hesitation, hanging low between them. A pause which hit Lena straight against her throat. And the imagined tension will send a hot rush of wetness running across her fingertips. She will tip her head back and moan.)


End file.
